Chapter 5
Agile working and well-being

74% of the males declare a perceived increase in productivity, while 76.5% of the respondents
declare to save time on commuting from home to work. As anticipated in the methodological
paragraph, to deepen insights on the limits and on the advantages of agile working during the
pandemic, we analysed the open-ended answers of the D11 and D12 questions through the
Maxqda software. This analysis procedure brings out the range of perceptions not grasped through
the closed responses. In fact, the procedure of coding and the analysis of the qualitative data allow
us to divide the thematic areas of the perceived advantages into five points: life quality, new
working tools and methods, free time and working time conciliation, efficiency, savings.
In the life quality dimension, 40% of the respondents declare to have a better management of
time, being able to juggle better between work and extra commitments. The respondents
appreciated also the possibility to experiment new working tools: for instance, 43% of the
respondents declare to have had the opportunity to attend more online conferences than before
the pandemic, when they almost exclusively occurred face-to-face. R&Ts also appreciated new
tools (IT) and new working places, as well as a greater propensity to develop their work by goals.
Regarding the free time and the working time conciliation, 44% of the answers concern the
improved possibility of looking after children and relatives, and they also mentioned, among the
advantages, the increased time for housekeeping, the flexible management of working time and
the possibility of helping children while they are in distance learning.
Compared to work efficiency, 56% of the segments coded in this dimension identify as an
advantage the possibility to have fewer distractions while working from home, with respect to
working in the office, and 33% of them claim that they perceived an improvement in terms of
productivity. Among the advantages of smart working, they also indicated the promotion of work
among teams spread over multiple locations. Finally, the last dimension mentioned in terms of
benefits concerns the savings in commuting time (29%), the economic savings due to the lower
number of trips, the savings in time lost into the traffic, and the economic savings for the
institution (electricity, water, and heating).
While the segments coded for the advantages of smart working were 71, the limits were
mentioned seven times more (536). These data describe the heterogeneity of the problems that
have emerged and the difficulty of systematizing and plugging them in a closed-ended question.
The analysis brought out seven areas of perceived limits: space and tools, workaholism, scientific
partnership, family composition, social issues, rigidity of the institution, pandemic-related issues.
The working space and equipment available were the major limitations for the R&T
respondents. In fact, 223 strings have been encoded in this area and among these, 43% of them
claim as a major limit the difficulty of carrying out experimental activities. Weak internet
connection and inadequate working space-equipment (shared family spaces, noisy environment,
unsuitable workplace): these difficulties have been perceived more by researchers and
technologists coming from STEM disciplines.
To define the second area of limits that emerged, we borrowed the term workaholism,
introduced by Kreiner et al. (2009) to describe the colonisation of the private life by work. Among
researchers and technologists, 26% of the segments coded in this area are related to the difficulty
to disconnect. Working from home sometimes means making the barriers between working and
free time/space indistinct and disconnecting from work becomes difficult. Respondents declare
to remain available even outside the usual working hours, which has a negative impact on family
and spare time. In fact, 20% of them declare that during smart working they are not able to
distinguish working time from free time. Likewise, respondents detect the fragmentation and
expansion of working time caused by household needs and family care. The interruptions impose
a time dilation and make the distinctions blurred: these results are consistent with the multinomial
logit model presented in the previous subsection.
An unexpected limitation of smart working (11%) is the hyper-connection: overload of
telematic meetings, excessive exposure to PCs and other electronic devices such as phones /
tablets.